It’s heartening that 45365 won Best Documentary at SXSW; Severe Clear is ultimately stronger, but 45365 is the only doc I saw that took any formal risks. The first five minutes made me think I was looking at the doc of the year, let alone the fest.

First the opening shot, repeated several times, a stream of text and colors passing by illegibly fast. (I finally figured out it was an extreme close-up of a train passing by on the third go-round.) Then we’re in an empty theater with a man playing trumpet for no one, which is downright Lynchian. What comes next is showy but dazzling: using the local radio station as an audio link, we go from the station’s extremely efficient DJ to a cop driving along listening, cuting out of the car to zoom into the valley below where the high school football team is practicing as they’re being discussed on the radio, cuts back to the station, cuts to the fair that’s now being discussed, etc. ad infinitum.

Safe to say there’s a lot of formal control here; for their feature doc debut, Bill and Turner Ross appear to have never put themselves in a situation where they couldn’t figure out the most elegant shot in about five seconds flat (although they’re mostly skeptical of and avoid the outright lyrical). And yet, throughout this aesthetically admirable movie, I couldn’t figure out the thematic point; I kept waiting for something revelatory, something that would get me inside either the people on display or the town’s vibe. Instead, all I can tell you is that Sidney, OH (45365) is a nice, small Midwestern town, where everything that stereotypically implies — and nothing more — is firmly set in place.

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Looking up at her co-star Souleymane Sy Savane and noting the pain written on his face, child actress Diana Franco Galindo pulled aside Goodbye Solo director Ramin Bahrani to ask why it was that his character at this moment seemed so sad.

“I don’t know; why do you think he is so sad?” Bahrani asked.

Not having read any of the script beyond her own scenes, Galindo thought for a second on the question.

Here, of course, is all the story background that she, in considering the question, knew nothing of: With this latest work, Bahrani studies the world of naturally jovial, curious taxi driver Solo who, in meeting cantankerous, suicidal fare William (Red West), is forced to reconsider the definitions of friendship. Opening with an already quarrelsome scene between the two men, Goodbye, Solo, while quite a comfortable film to engage with, its journey full of levity as Solo studies for an exam to land a job as a flight attendant, leaves no easy way out either for its characters nor its audience. William has full intentions of leaving everything in life behind him, and Solo, despite his growing affection for the man, must learn not only to let him go but also to help him on his way.

Knowing this perhaps makes Galindo’s answer to Bahrani in that moment all this much more poignant.

“I think because he failed his exam,” she says.

“That’s a really good answer. Why don’t you really encourage him to pass it then!” Bahrani told her.

”And she said she would, and thus she really fills Solo with courage and hope in the final scene to pass, and manages to cheer him up and put a smile on his face about the future, right when another man’s future has been cut and Solo is thinking about the past, mortality, fragility and the briefness of life,” Bahrani explains.

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Lena Dunham’s SXSW Emerging Visions entry Creative Nonfiction is exactly that — an Emerging Vision. It’s the early and somewhat unformed work of a clearly ambitious artist (22 year-old Dunham wrote, directed and stars in a dual role in the film, which was shot on video and 16mm over the course of several years, beginning when she was a junior at Oberlin College and making extensive use of that school’s dorm rooms as sets) who seems to know what she wants to say, which is something of a feat in itself. If she doesn’t quite manage to actually say it in this, her first feature, if her enthusiasm for the language and possibilities of cinematic comedy seem to outweigh her grasp of tools and technique, she proves herself as someone to watch, as a conceptual artist and as a comedienne.

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There’s the SXSW of indie premieres, and then there’s the stuff the fanboys come for; the home of Ain’t It Cool News and the Alamo Drafthouse has an understandably enthusiastic place in its slate for midnight gorefests. So relax fanboys: Sam Raimi’s “work-in-progress” screening of May 29’s Drag Me To Hell (missing ambient sound and end credits, but generally looking ready to judge) showed the final product will give you what you want. There will be cartoonish gore and gleeful bad taste; yes, there will be Evil Dead shout-outs. Alison Lohman shall suffer the punishment of beautiful blonde women everywhere: she will atone for her selfishness, and she will do it in a wet t-shirt.

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A self-admitted lover of armchair philosophy, nonfiction filmmaker Andrew Neel prefers questions to answers. “Present day cinema, indie documentaries included, has devolved into thesis-driven filmmaking; people want a conclusion walking out the door. I think that’s the death of cinema.

“When I leave a film that I feel is really good, I leave with lots of complicated questions that I can’t always answer, that I don’t feel comfortable answering,” he explains.

In studying the little understood culture of political conspiracy theorists, Neel, along with longtime collaborator and co-director Luke Meyer, engages with New World Order several of these uncomfortable questions, the most unnerving of which are: Is there a global elite, this New World Order, that orchestrates the hierarchies and power plays in societies? Does this elite, more alarmingly, hope to handicap the world only to rebuild it in its own image later?

As it follows the leaders of the growing 9/11 Truth Movement, foremost among them incendiary activist Alex Jones, the documentary staunchly refuses to make any judgment calls. If at times the messages sent within the film edify too passionately, the calls “9/11 was an inside job,” and “Wake up!” forever after to play in the recordings of the subconscious, it’s that the subjects of the film, not Neel or Meyer themselves as directors, have spoken those messages out so forcefully. Opting instead simply to gaze with great compassion at its oft ignored and scorned subjects, New World Order, at its core, is much less about government machinations than it is about the profundity of humaneness in a world rife with confusion.

Whereas in their last directorial collaboration Darkon, a glimpse into the fantasy world of live action role players, Neel and Meyer had the freedom to engage with all questions of fact and fiction, with New World Order, Neel says, explorations were thorny in that through the process of making the film questions arose that, as the directors, neither he nor Meyer could address for fear of compromising their objectivity, and hence the film along with it. In this interview, however, Neel opens up to share his thoughts on the power of ideas, the problem of peaceful revolution and the little bit of fear he has for the future.

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Sorry, Thanks is the directorial debut of Dia Sokol, the producer of films by Andrew Bujalski, Alex Karpovsky and Joe Swanberg; it stars Bujalski and a cast of largely non-actors; it was shot by Matthias Grunsky, the cinematographer of both Mutual Appreciation and Nights and Weekends. The sum total of these names and titles point in a certain trajectory of recent American film, one which need not be named by name to anyone who recognizes these references.

But Sorry, Thanks equally reminds of the indie films of the 90s, the kind of low budget but fully realized ensemble films that, if you didn’t see at Sundance, you’ve seen hundreds of times on the Sundance channel, the kind that slowly and cumulatively but surely turned character actors like Sam Rockwell and Catherine Keener into something like stars. Sorry, Thanks, a uniquely moral film but also a very funny one, offers the same kind of platform for the talents of Bujalski (here playing a real character, one even further afield from the on-screen persona developed across his own first two features than the dickish office manager in last year’s Goliath), and, even more so, Wiley Wiggins. Wiggins, in his first leading role in eight years, gives a minor miracle of a comic performance as Max, a 30-ish fuck-up who’s so deep within his own dysfunction that he can hardly see it.

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As a wedding present, Kris and Joe Swanberg received, among other gifts, an ice-cream maker. Almost immediately, Kris found herself experimenting with recipes—whiskey with bread pudding, hot chocolate with roasted marshmallows, coffee and doughnut and gingersnap cookie, four flavors a season. She sells them now by the pint at a local grocery store. During the day Kris heads to work as a substitute teacher, and though she loves teaching and is pursuing her graduate work in higher education, it’s a transitional occupation that she says is rather worthless and unfulfilling.

Joe, meanwhile, constantly developing ideas for a seemingly endless list of to-make films, struggles with all those mundanities that thwart his creative productivity. “Doing my laundry or washing my dishes, all of these tasks are cutting into time that I could use to be making work,” he says. “If I could employ a labor force to dress me in the morning, do all these tasks, drive me places, and if I could have people simultaneously scouting locations for several different projects and setting up the paperwork with SAG, then I’d have the energy within me to make six or seven features a year, I’m sure. Now, I’m just physically incapable of it.” The statement, made during an initial interview, is all the more humorously appropriate considering that Kris answers the phone for the second of the two lengthy conversations saying, “Oh, I’ll get Joe; he’s just folding socks.”

In many ways, as most couples do, Kris and Joe see and think in very different manners. While Kris tends not to debate film, or even at times actively note it, Joe delves into every nook and cranny of a cinematic trend or debate. While she’s articulate although softer spoken, he’s passionately, loudly declarative. While she finds comfort in realism, he finds himself moving into a greater period of experimentation. Yet for all of these differences, and perhaps because of them, the Swanbergs have weathered ten years together of both romantic ramblings and professional collaborations. This is only just the briefest of glimpses at the Swanbergs as a couple.

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Two kids — a boy of 11, and a girl of 9, brother and sister, apparent runaways — drag a duffel bag into a crumbly, seemingly abandoned house. Now they live there. No one seems to be looking for them, and they offer no explanation as to where they came from or why they ran away. They could as likely be aliens as lost little children. It’s almost as if they’ve drifted off into another realm, some kind of Oz.

The first half of David Lowery’s feature directorial debut St. Nick is devoted to the ways in which this family unit spends their days building a life in their new home. Procuring provisions for cheese sandwiches, salvaging furniture, fixing the toilet. Arguing about the fate of the dog they left behind, and whether or not he misses his under-age owners. Virtually wordless for long stretches of time, St. Nick relies heavily on contemplative imagery to convey meaning –– particularly, the clear-lit landscape or a Texas winter in juxtaposition with the pink-and-white faces of his two young stars, real-life siblings Tucker and Savanna Sears. As both types of images, both equally beautiful and mysterious, become increasingly gray, the film matures from a study of actions infused with a quiet magic, to a study of inaction, of waiting and drifting telegraphing an increasingly palpable sense of fear and dread.

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On the other end of the phone line, first time feature director though veteran film and television producer Dia Sokol admits that she’s more than a bit nervous for this interview about her naturalistic “anti-chemistry, unromantic comedy” debut Sorry, Thanks. “This never used to happen to me. As a producer, I’d listen to directors fumble their way through describing their films, and I’ve always jumped in and been the person to sell it, to be articulate about it, and now I totally get it,” she says. “When it’s your film, you’re totally inarticulate about it; it comes from inside of you, so you have no perspective.”

Starring a mixed cast of professional and non-professional actors and shot by a skeleton crew in San Francisco’s endearingly eccentric Mission District, Sorry, Thanks follows two adrift lonesomes Max (Wiley Wiggins) and Kira (Kenya Miles), neither of whom, even after a shared one-night stand, can begin to reconcile their thoughts on romantic relationships. As Max chases Kira, detaching himself along the way from longtime girlfriend Sara (Ia Hernandez), and attempts to immune himself to the criticism of his best bud Mason (Andrew Bujalski), Kira explores an uninspiring dating scene that only very quietly pinpoints the sadness of her recent break-up.

Despite its bittersweet, introspection-inducing lining, Sorry, Thanks is at its core incredibly funny, even at times painfully funny. Foibles are so at the surface, sarcasm so easily blended with childlike wonder that it’s simple to just enjoy the film without questioning every character intention and situation repercussion. It’s easy, namely, to root for Max and Kira even as they stumble into moral quagmires, and that’s where Sokol, in only the most articulate of manners, begins discussing her work.

[In the film’s production notes] you pose the question, “Can we still love these characters even when they are doing things wrong?” For me that answer with this film was, “Yes.” Yet I don’t fully know why it is that I still have that faith even as I watch these characters fall into situations that are morally gray. So, this idea of the moral quandary, I was hoping that we could start our talk there.

I started my career working for Errol Morris, and that informed a lot of my skepticism about the idea of redemption. So, when I talked to [co-writer and producer Lauren Veloski] about starting to write this, I said, “I really want to make a film that’s about redemption.” (laughs) When I look at this film now and think about that, to me it’s a reminder, “Oh yeah, and I don’t believe in redemption.” I believe in it as a concept, but I don’t know that I believe in it as an actuality. I don’t think the world works that way, and I’m incredibly ambivalent about films that act like you can make up for your bad actions. So, in some ways, I wanted the film to be about, “When you break something, is it really broken?”

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Jody Lee Lipes, cinematographer of Antonio Campos‘ Afterschool, makes his feature length directorial debut with the SXSW Emerging Visions selection Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same, a beautifully shot doc about an artist struggling to maintain a somewhat normal domestic relationship while producing a half-baked, largely inscrutable but still vaguely offensive installation for a New York gallery. Below the jump, check out the film’s trailer, as well as Lipes’ answers to The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone.

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Judi Krant’s Made in China, premiering in Narrative Competition at SXSW, follows “a self-styled novelty inventor from a small town in East Texas” (Jackson Kuehn) who travels to Shanghai to make it big with his latest bright idea. In her answers to The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone, below the jump, Krant talks about paying the bills with vegetable oil, breaking out of jail with art cinema, and counteracting the SXSW conspiracy theory.

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As SXSW 2009 approaches we’ll be asking filmmakers to spill the superficial details about their films, to tell us all the deep personal details of what makes them tick, and –– new this year! –– reveal who they had to sleep with, in the incestuous conspiracy-minded secret society that is the wider SXSW community, in order to get their film programmed at the festival.

Our latest installment: Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, a documentary by entomologist Jessica Oreck (and shot by Sean Williams, the cinematographer of Frownland) about the affinity for insects in Japanese culture. You can watch the visually stunning trailer for the film on its website; Oreck answers The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone Below.

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The Time of Their Lives from redbird PRODUCTIONS on Vimeo.

As SXSW 2009 approaches we’ll be asking filmmakers to spill the superficial details about their films, to tell us all the deep personal details of what makes them tick, and –– new this year! –– reveal who they had to sleep with, in the incestuous conspiracy-minded secret society that is the wider SXSW community, in order to get their film programmed at the festival.

Today we take a look at Jocelyn Cammack’s Emerging Visions documentary The Time of Their Lives. Previously screened at Sheffield Doc/Fest, the film follows three female activists –– ages 88 to 102 –– living together in a home for active elderly adults. Watch the trailer above, and read Jocelyn’s answers to The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone below.

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Make out with Make-out with Violence

It’s rare that you Google the title of a film making its SXSW premiere in the Emerging Visions program, and discover a two year-old making of short, complete with impressively-looking underwater photography and 70s style voiceover, but the Deagol Brothers, the young minds behind Make-Out With Violence, seem hellbent on defying expectations. For one thing, unlike the Wilson, Duplass and Zellner Brothers who preceded them at SXSW, the Deagols aren’t real brothers; as their bio puts it, they’re “a collective of multimedia artists that strive for excellence in art and entertainment” who, “attracted by the communal aspect of film production, choose to not be credited as individuals.” We assume, then, that the above short outing the trio’s real names (we think?) will soon either be edited or made to disappear, so watch it while you can. Until then, the Brothers celebrate the communal aspect of film promoting by answering The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone in one voice, below the jump.

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